Harley Quinn (Black and White)

Harley Quinn

I noticed my Blog was quickly becoming nothing but art for my posts to the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: Redux Blog.  Not that there is anything wrong with that, of course--it's a great Blog and lots of fun to work on.  But, I think I've been getting a bit lazy and decided I need to change things up a bit.  And, with that, I thought it would be fun to do some character studies.  In this case, it's a drawing of Harley Quinn.  I will probably do up a colorized version in the next day or two.

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STEP ONE:  I used soft, vine charcoal to loosely sketch the pose on a sheet of 11" x 14" Strathmore toned paper.  I like working on a toned surface as it gives three values for the price of two (the mid-toned paper, plus black charcoal and white chalk), as opposed to just the two values of black charcoal on white paper.

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STEP TWO:  I smear the charcoal to soften the lines and push it into general shaded areas.

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STEP THREE:  I used charcoal and carbon pencils to build up shading and a kneaded eraser to carve back out some highlights.

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STEP FOUR:  Here is the finished charcoal drawing.  I also didn't care for the angle of the right-foot in the original drawing and changed it.

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STEP FIVE:  I went in an added some highlights with a white charcoal pencil.  I then took this picture and opened it in PhotoShop to clean it up a bit and use it as a framework to continue the drawing/painting digitally.

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STEP SIX:  In PhotoShop, I darkened and smoothed out the shading, bumped up the highlights more, and also changed the expression on her face, as well as corrected a few other odd-and-ends.  I thought I'd leave this one as black-and-white for now, and do a colorized version in a couple days.  :-)

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This was done with charcoal on 11" x 14" toned Strathmore drawing paper, then imported into PhotoShop.

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